Book of the Dead

Published on September 13, 2010.

According to David Meerman Scott, marketers should look to the Dead for advice. “The Grateful Dead pioneered many social media and inbound marketing concepts in the 1960s that businesses across all industries use today,” said Scott, co-author of “Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History” (Wiley, August 2010), in a statement. Together with Brian Halligan, CEO of marketing software company Hubspot, Scott deconstructed 19 marketing concepts practiced by the band. Some of our favorites: 1) Research your industry to create unique benefits for your customers, over new technology or complicated improvements. 2) If your marketing team looks like everyone else’s, reorganize by searching outside the department and industry to fill gaps. 3) CEOs and manage-ment teams should allow marketers to experiment (five times more than average) to create breakthrough innovations instead of avoiding failure. 4) Lose control and let your community define marketing messages. 5) Create free content (blogs, videos, white papers, e-books) to dramatically open the top of your marketing funnel. Both authors, taken together, have seen the band perform more than 140 times.